


Challenges Answered

by Leyenn



Category: Xena: Warrior Princess
Genre: Community: femslash100, Drabble Sequence, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 23:43:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leyenn/pseuds/Leyenn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The evolution of a relationship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prelude To Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> A series of drabbles or double-drabbles coordinating the prompts list of femslash100 with the _Xena_ episode list. Not complete by a long shot, but not strictly abandoned, either.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A chance meeting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pre-ep for _Sins Of The Past_.

She shouldn't be here. Perdicus would rage blue murder if he knew. She told him she was washing her hair.

The inn is dark and smoky, the bar darker and hidden in unwashed bodies adorned with pristine steel. She drinks ale, feeling brave and braver after a few mugs. It smells like piss and tastes worse, but that's part of this place, so she over-tips the innkeeper and asks for a room. A bard should sup all she can from her inspiration, and Potadeia has long run out of anything new.

Her path collides with a leather wall of chest, a drunken leer and grubby fingers grasping. A sudden cold sweat on her skin: she wants to struggle and can't remember how.

Calloused clean fingers close at her arm and resist for her. She looks up at fatty jowls faced off by a tall stranger, long-haired, cloaked and leathered and half-hidden in the gloom. Her heart pounds and pounds and skips and pounds again; she's quite convinced her chest may explode, her skin might be sparkling under that grip.

Tall, dark strangers were never real before today, but this one who turns away without meeting eyes is her story forever.

  


*

  



	2. Gone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The ones left behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Post-ep for _Sins Of The Past_. For the femslash100 prompt _heartbreak_.

He gets up into an ordinary day, goes out into an ordinary morning, and everyone looks at him strangely. Lila breaks things to him, eventually. She can't bear the blitheness in his face any longer.

She tells him of waking in the night, of a Gabrielle too clumsy to sneak out alone without sound who's just run away to be a warrior. She doesn't say the real word, the one she found in her head years ago, when she knew her sister wasn't right for this life. She doesn't say _different_. She doesn't speak of that at all. He believes Gabrielle a foolish girl with a fantasy, and she lets him. She lets them all.

She can't tell them of creeping out to see Gabrielle walk into the dark with her head high and not ever looking back. She can't speak to anyone of those strange things Gabrielle wished for in the quiet of night, or the hands that must be holding her now. Alone she feels the pull of life taking its price, as that distant stranger whose darkness stole her sister away.

It hurts her to think of it all, and she knows it would break him inside.

  


*

  



	3. Shock Of The New

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Someone is surprised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the femslash100 prompt, _someone is surprised._

The night (their first) is pitch black and rumbling with the fingerprints of a storm, exactly the way all good stories should begin.

Except that Xena sleeps like the dead and it's unnerving when she's so used to Lila's soft snores. And there seems to be an invisible, unfindable stone under her left buttock.

The dry trail meat she chewed on for supper is still making her back tooth ache, and she had no idea the life of a warrior meant meeting so many interesting bugs. She is also acutely aware that dark and stormy is not a romantic prospect up close... in either a night like this, or a companion like that.

Gabrielle of Potadeia, Warrior Bard, seems very much a silly little girl's dream tonight.

"Gabrielle."

She jumps, with no idea her shivering is being watched. "I'm fine."

"Shut up. Get over here."

The growl almost puts her off. Years on, she'll understand why it didn't.

  


*

  



	4. Tokens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A glimpse into another life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the femslash100 prompt, _someone discovers a secret_.

She wasn't really looking. She didn't mean to...

Or, yes, all right, she was, but not - looking for a flint - for the fire - and that little sewing kit, there's a hole starting inside her left heel, here, look -

Xena just sits across the flames, watching them burn down, never speaking. She keeps her hands low, turning the beads over and over, letting them roll over toughened skin they once might have caressed. She struck the fire herself an hour past; the needle and thread are stuck half into their work and untouched. Gabrielle sits barefoot and wriggles her toes into the borrowed furs without hope of warmth.

"They're beautiful." It's as high a whisper as she dares, without giving away the tremble in her voice. Strange, though, how when Xena speaks there's an answering tremor in the words.

"They were for Lyceus." Beyond the tips of the fire, she rolls a jade tear along her palm with a finger. "A gift... for his betrothal."

She doesn't really know why she goes on, knowing what must come next. "You didn't say..." but the words get lost, somewhere in the icy shadows of those eyes.

"He never was."

  


*

  



End file.
